Aquanode DocsQuickstart
Launch your first pod, connect to it, do some work, and stop paying for it.
This walks the whole loop in the console: launch a pod, get onto the box, do some work,
and stop paying for it. Prefer the terminal? Do the same thing with the
aq CLI quickstart.
Create an account
Sign up and verify your email. You will need credit on the account before you can rent a machine, which you can add from Billing. Cards and Solana both work.
Launch a pod
Go to Pods and click New pod.
- Pick an Environment. A built-in empty box gives you a GPU and a shell with nothing preinstalled. Notebook gives you JupyterLab and PyTorch. Image generation and Video generation give you ComfyUI on a card sized for the job.
- Pick a Volume. A new, empty one is the default; you can attach an existing one of yours instead.
- Name it. The name is not an id, so you can change it later.
- Under Run it on, leave Pick for me selected. Any free card will do, so Aquanode takes the cheapest one that fits.
- Optionally tick Stop it when it goes idle so the pod stops charging on its own if you walk away.
- Click Create and launch.
The right-hand panel prices the launch before anything is rented: the machine, its VRAM, the provider, the hourly rate, and a running-all-day estimate. Nothing is started and nothing is charged until a box actually comes up.
You do not create a pod separately
The pod exists from this first launch. There is no second step to turn the box into something reusable.
Get onto the box
Once the pod is running, open it and use Open deployment to reach the machine. From there you get the HTTPS URL and credentials for whatever app your Environment installed, plus a browser terminal on providers that support one.
From your own terminal:
aq ssh <name>That manages the keypair and writes a ~/.ssh/config alias, so plain ssh <alias>
works afterwards.
Do some work
Put your work under /workspace. That is your Volume, and it is the only part of the
pod that holds your data. Anything you install outside it is Environment, and anything
outside both lives only on the rented machine and goes away with it.
There is nothing to click to save your work: the volume saves itself in the background while the pod runs, and both the environment and the volume are captured in full when you Stop.
Stop paying for it
Stop the pod. That captures the environment and volume, then releases the machine, so the hourly charge stops:
aq stop <name>Bring it back later on whatever card is free:
aq start <name>A stopped pod rents no machine. You pay only to hold what it saved, at $0.02/GiB per month.
If you are finished with the machine entirely, close it from the machine page with
Close deployment, or run aq down <name>.